i was wearing very nice slacks and shirt with my tie sitting next to me. we typically don't wear suit coats in arizona - something about death by heat stroke...

sorry bruce - on this one you are wrong. this was an extremely quiet area. no issues there. everyone in there would fall into the respectable income, professional category. no drug or alcohol related calls to the police. he just happened to be motoring through and i just happened to be there.

Yeah, but you didn't get maced and tazered, and you weren't wearing a suit.
I can't see that sticking if your car is parked at home. If your at the mall they might have a case, but not at home.:(

trust me - it sticks. i am not a proponent of drinking and driving, but they have gotten the laws so over the top that it is easy to get screwed by them if you have a less than scrupulous cop, which there are plenty of. and it makes no difference what color you are - a bad cop is a bad cop.

Well, I'm willing to admit that I could be wrong in my perception (I believe I was wrong about something once before back in '84 or was it '76? hmmm....). Still, it seems to me that given the choice between a black guy in jeans sitting on the tailgate of his truck versus a whiteman in a business suit sitting on the tailgate of his SUV, the cops would hone in on the black guy a higher percentage of the time, but what do I know?

Speaking of DUI's: I know a guy who realized that he'd had too much to drink, so he pulled his car into the parking lot of the local Safeway. He pushed the driver's seat back and took a little nap to sleep off the alcohol. The next thing he knew, the cops were pounding on his window and charging him with a DUI. He'd have been better off just driving home drunk and sleeping it off there.

He should have hidden the keys and slept in the passenger seat. That has been used successfully in court.;)

Yeah, I've used a varient of that one. I wasn't driving drunk, but my driver's license had expired and I had a whopping traffic fine that I had to pay before I could renew it, and I simply didn't have that kind of money. I was driving along and one of my contacts popped out. Some 6th sense must have warned me because I pulled over to the side of the road, pulled the keys out of the ignition and got into the passenger's seat to look for my contact. Sure enough, the cops pulled up to see what was going on. I told them that I'd just had a big fight with my boyfriend and that he'd gotten out of the car and walked off in a huff. I must have seemed believable, especially with my eye filled with tears due to the contact lens problem. They ran my vehicle on their computer and saw that it was legal, registered in my name. I told them that my "boyfriend" had been driving since my license was expired. The cops actually gave me a ride back into town where I called a friend to come get my car for me!

Well, it happened again.

Woman in Taser case gets probation, horn-honking charge dismissed

So the cops respond to a disturbance call, get into an argument with a 67-year-old lady in the street outside which escalates, and end up stunning her.

a) Why not just walk away? She wasn't interfering with their duties.
b) What about the original call? It would be pretty embarrassing if someone was seriously injured or killed while the cops were outside stunning bystanders.

The fact that neither the woman or her husband had any kind of record makes me suspicious of the cops. I don't know enough about the witnesses relationship to the woman or her husband to judge their testimony.

In elementary school we were taught to walk away from rude people. Maybe next time the cops can repeat 'stick and stones' a few times and get over it.

Tonight police brought us an unruly 14 year old girl.

What's unruly? She had taken her legal guardian's living room apart ... broken furniture, vases, picture frames, everything. The kid was raging and not going to stop.

Not for nothing.

That's why the guardian called the cops on her ... even the cops couldn't get her calmed down despite their relative expertise in de-escalating the extremely pissed off.

So, the cop pulled out his special magic wand ... and the kid cut the shit right out.

Because she looked down and saw the little red dot from the laser sight on the Taser smack in the middle of her chest.

Magic.

WHAT??? You're fuckin' kidding me!

FUCK THAT SHIT!

If a cop ever points a taser at me they WILL see a lawsuit. I don't care if it's a busybody lawsuit. They need to cut that shit out, pronto. This was not the idea of not using deadly force, that they can fuckin' cattleprod 14 year olds at will, and anyone else who's remotely out of line.

Who gives a crap how much furniture they destroy!

Sooner or later someone's gonna catch 50000 volts across their bridgework, and forget how to say their own name, and then sorry won't be enough.

Sorry UT, you're way off on this one. The cops are there to put a stop to her destruction, not to watch while she "lets off steam" in a violent or threatening manner. They also have the right to protect themselves in the course of their duties, and physically wrestling a 14 y.o. girl is an invitation to about a dozen other lawsuits ranging from molestation to unnecessary force. Notice, also, that the threat of being tasered was enough to calm her down. That's the way it's supposed to work.

Every cop that carries one has been zapped themselves. They don't aim for the head, they hook em in the torso from close range. I say fire away.

Tasers are fine for most people. With my heart, I would very likely die if tasered.

Needless to say, I plan to say "yes sir" and "no sir" to cops at every opportunity. Heck, I might even call the station and say it for no reason whatsoever, just in case.

Things like taser usage play the odds. Odds are that more serious injuries and deaths are going to be prevented than caused nationwide, over time. I think it is a viable alternative to other, less subtle methods of intervention and restraint. That said, there *are* going to be abuses. There is another taser case which was just concluded in KC that cost two cops their jobs for tasering a guy *five times*. He was combative and could well have hurt both himself and the cops, but there was a dashboard video from the cops' car showing the whole incident, and the department determined that #5 was uncalled for and vindictive, and so the cops lost their jobs.

Nobody gave a crap about the furniture.

It was about the killing the aunt parts. And the screaming. And the raging. And the refusing to respond.

Essentially the same things that went into the decisionmaking about pepper spray.

I also expect that you are imagining what you remember 14 year old girls to be too ... she was about 5'9" or 5'10" and looked like she was 25.

Well the 16 year olds in the Wawa parking lot in West Chester at 10pm last night had their own taser and it was like a joke to 'em. I guess the old rule about not pointing a weapon at something you don't intend to destroy doesn't apply any longer. This wasn't what was intended with non-lethal weaponry.

Somehow, I don't think 'tort reform' is a reason to taser someone. Cops have every right to defend themselves and protect the public. Choosing zapping someone with 50,000 volts over the destruction of some furniture is a bad choice.

Tasering someone for talking about hurting someone seems counterproductive. It won't make them change their minds.